Yes, i actually 'am' that pathetic. I am going to breifly walk through, with steps for each thing. I am
not going to add pictures on this walkthrough, because it will be quite idiotic, and take an extremely long period of time.
Here is my Quick Overview of making a Template Tutorial for Photoshop.
Sections 1 - Layout (Finding Colors)
~~ The first thing you need to do is figure out, if you want a dark template, or a light template. Light templates are usually bright, use white as a main color, or silvers. Colors that usually go with white/silver are blue, like this site, or a bright red. Other colors may go with white/silver also, but i believe these are most used.
For a dark template, you usually use black, or a dark gray, as a main color. Some secondary colors include: Dark Red, Purple, Green, Blue, (pretty much all colors except light colors like: pink, yellow, light blue,) Too much contrast in colors can hurt the eyes.
So for your help, click on this link
Color Remixiers to put in a hex color, and it gives you colors. Down in the preview box, you can see an example, and that is your template colors.
Im not going to go into putting them in the right place. Mainly just go to Edit Forum Colors in your admin bar, and put the hex codes in, in the places you think they should go. You can always modify this later.
~~Gradients - How to Make
Ok, next thing i would do is make a gradient, aight? First, one thing to do is just to find the legnth of your board, or modify it if your a codes person, and make a gradient (maybe a 700x30 high) and make a gradient across with a border. Just put that at the top, and bottom of categories, using 2 colors from the color remixers site. Put it in, and it fits. You can find other tutorials (or use the polygonal lasso tool if you know how) to make more techish borders. If you fill up entire area, save as PNG file, or if you only use part of the space, with checkers in background, save as a GIF format with transparent. That is basically it.
Then, make more gradients for menu gradients, and board gradients and such, and find different codes in the code board for that.
~~Banner
If you made the gradients, you should look at them, and the two colors you used, should be in the banner, and should be the main colors. Use brushing (brushes) that can be found at
Deviant Art and brush a nice banner. (sizes range from 700 x 100 to 700 x 120). It is your choice to make it grungy, abstract, trendwhore, depending on your gradients. Tech banners are also becoming more and more increasingly popular.
~~On/Off Icons
Ok, you made the banner and gradients and colors. Use 1 of the 2 colors you have been using from the past 2 things, and use 1 of them for this. Click
Here, this is a tutorial by Crestfallen. Insignias. Make a big transparent background 100x100 works good. Then follow the tutorial. Resize it down to 50x50, then make background transparent, while saving in GIF format. Then, go back to it, and color it using 2nd color. The more colorful one. (the not black, not white one) is Your ON icon. Replace it in Custom Images with the folder with the BLUE button. Replace the Black/White one with the folder with the GRAY icon. You have on/off icons.
~~Menu Buttons
Go into Photoshop, make an image size of about 50x20 (50 far, by 20 hi). Make some text, put a black border around it. save it, then replace the word it represents with the image in CUSTOMIZE Images. Menu Buttons.
~~Smilies
Make a document, size 20 x 20 or 15 x 15. Make a Circle select around the entire box using the Shift + Circle Select. Fill the circle with a gradient using the non gray, non white, non black color, and put it in a gradient with a lighter or darker color depending on your color scheme. Add Eyes, a mouth, and whatever else you want. Use the default smilies, or smilies from another site
to spark interest. Remember, you can also other shapes for smilies, but that is more advanced.
~~Info Center Icons
Ok, Here, you can just leave them the same on your site, or follow this. Mainly, just make a rounded rectangle and a square shape. Put the rectangle on top of the square and bam!! A computer. Rasterize the layer, then add whatever you want, maybe a find edges or whatever, then saturate it. ( CTRL + U ) and make it fit your color scheme. This is the Info Center stuff. Then, make a circle, and oval. Make sure that 1/2 the oval is below the size barrie, so it looks like a have oval. Put circle on top of that, do same thing as above, and this is the Users Icon.
~~Rest
All you need to do now is save the defaults of the rest of the stuff (EX: UBBC icons, Folders) and change the saturation on them to fit your color scheme. Put them in your template, and your done.
This was as i said, a breif walkthrough of a template creating. If you find something missing, because this is a long tutorial, please pm me, and ill add it in. Please do not rip this tutorial, because it took an extremely long amount of time to put together, and because i believe this is one of the few tutorials on templates out there.
This is for use on a Proboards message board only, because of the unique tools. I might make another one of these for V 4 of Proboards if PB v4 differs that much.
Thank you for reading this, and my fingers hurt, lol.
;D
SniperJrd
offline
to spark interest. Remember, you can also other shapes for smilies, but that is more advanced.
